Technology
People paralyzed as the result of an accident or a serious illness are reliant on the help of others in many situations. In the Brain2Robot project, an international team of researchers has developed a robot control system based on EEG signals, which could in the future help very severely paralyzed patients to regain a certain degree of independence. You are cordially invited to attend a press demonstration of the Brain2Robot system:
Time: 14 November 2007, 12:30–1:30 p.m.
Place: Medica, Düsseldorf Trade Fair Centre, Hall 3, Booth F92 (BMBF)
To control the robot arm, the Brain-Computer…
Motorized prosthetic arms can help amputees regain some function, but these devices take time to learn to use and are limited in the number of movements they provide.
Todd A. Kuiken, M.D., Ph.D., a physiatrist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago and professor at Northwestern University, has pioneered a technique known as targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR), which allows a prosthetic arm to respond directly to the brain’s signals, making it much easier to use than traditional motorized prosthetics.
This technique, still under development, allows wearers to open and close their…
Only recently it was hard to imagine a game in which people compete only with their minds. Today, you can play it. At the end of this year Mindmower, the first biological Internet game, goes into beta testing.
Players fight against each other not with joysticks, but with their minds.
A device connected to the fingers, deciphers the player’s physiological parameters and sends them to the server. Your thoughts have a key influence on your avatar and the course of the whole game.
This will be a real-time game, in which one can compete with people from all over the world.
The game is based on…
A Finnish group of researchers at the Low Temperature Laboratory of Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) have developed and fabricated a nanoscale heat transistor, and simultaneously the smallest refrigerator ever made.
The device, nanofabricated with the help of electron beam lithography, functions at extremely low temperatures of less than one degree above absolute zero. The possibility to control the electrons going through the device one by one in the metal-superconductor structure enables its use as a heat transistor.
For your six pack of atoms. Credit: N. Miller, A. Clark/NIST
The…
The eeriest thing about visiting London is knowing you are being photographed 300 times per day yet still have a higher chance than all civilized countries except fellow UK member Scotland of being a victim of violent crime.
The solution? More targeted surveillance private business, less intrusion on honest people by governments, according to Scyron, a security and surveillance services company. They have released an 'intelligent, incident-based surveillance system' to the private sector. It follows successful deployments at 48 UK police forces, transforming the efficiency with which they…
Hank |
The most emails I ever received about an article was Social Science And Social News Sites because of a very small part of the article where we mentioned that we swapped out the Digg submission button with Slashdot.
My take was that our kind of serious science content is just not right for Digg, since the last hundred or so articles were buried by readers and thus not a good fit for their audience. Not so, said the people who wrote. They contended Digg has an internal bury list and that it was probably marketing related rather than being done by users. But there's no proof of that and it's…
Make way for the real nanopod and make room in the Guinness World Records. A team of researchers with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have created the first fully functional radio from a single carbon nanotube, which makes it by several orders of magnitude the smallest radio ever made.
“A single carbon nanotube molecule serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio -- antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator,” said physicist Alex Zettl, who led the invention of the nanotube radio. “Using carrier waves in…
With inspiration from bacteria and butterflies, researchers at Stockholm University have developed a new method that shows how nanomaterials can be produced in the future. In an article in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Lennart Bergström shows how a glass bottle and a simple hobby magnet can be used to produce and arrange extremely small cubes of iron oxide in a perfectly checkered pattern.
The new method can give magnetic films with superior information storage capacity," says Lennart Bergström.
To produce nanoparticles with a defined…
New research in carbon nanotechnology could give those in the line of fire materials which can bounce bullets without a trace of damage. Add in some moral certainty, a Commodore Amiga for the special effects and pithy one liners and we could have Robocop.
A research paper published in the Institute of Physics’ Nanotechnology details how engineers from the Centre for Advanced Materials Technology at the University of Sydney have found a way to use the elasticity of carbon nanotubes to not only stop bullets penetrating material but actually rebound their force.
Most anti-ballistic materials,…
Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed high-tech textile yarns that can be used to make clothing glow in the dark, ideal for late-night bicyclists and joggers.
Current high visibility products – such as those used by emergency services and highway maintenance workers – depend on external light sources to make them visible.
They can be ineffective in low light situations and require a light source from something like vehicle headlights to make them visible. This can lead to the wearer being seen too late.This new technology, made from electroluminescent (EL) yarns, allows…